Black smoke started pouring in through the hole I was looking through. I coughed. The air was thick. Oily. My lungs felt like they were on fire.
I should go to sleep now was the thought that came into my head. It was a powerful thought and seemed perfectly logical: Now I should go to sleep.
The cries of the other kids got louder: “The bus is on fire!” “It’s going to explode!” and “We’re going to die!”
And I thought, They’re right. Yes, we’ll die. But it’s okay. It’s fine. It is as it should be. We are going to die.
I heard this clanking. The sound of metal on metal.
And “She’s trying to open the door!”
And “Help us!”
I closed my eyes. I felt like I was floating down now, going underwater. Getting so sleepy warm. So comfortable.
And then this bright light opened up on me. And I saw how Mrs. Wooly had gotten the emergency door open. In her hands she held an ax.
And I heard her shout:
“Get in the godforsaken bus!”
CHAPTER TWO
SPACE BLANKETS
DAY 1
I was sleepy was the thing. I saw the kids scramble back toward Mrs. Wooly. She helped them get down on all fours and scoot out the emergency door, which was sideways.
There was a lot of shouting and people helping one another over the battered seats and slipping on the hail on the floor, slipping because everything was sticky, now with the blood of the kids who had been crushed and Mr. Reed and maybe also motor oil or gasoline, maybe … but, see, I was so warm and sleepy.
I was all the way up at the front of the bus, at the ground level, and the black smoke was encircling my head in these rich, ashy tendrils. Like arms from an octopus.
Niko came scrambling up the aisle, checking to see if anyone was left. As I was mostly under a seat, he didn’t see me until he was just about to turn back.
I wanted to tell him I’d be fine. I was happy and comfortable and it was time for me to go to sleep. But it was so far to go, to get to those words and then pull them up to my throat and my lips and then form them. I was too far under.
Niko grabbed my two arms and started pulling.
“Help me!” he shouted. “Kick your legs!”
I tried to move my legs. They were so thick and heavy. It was like I had the legs of an elephant. Like someone had replaced my lower half with a big sack of lead.
Niko was gasping now, the smoke getting thicker and thicker. He grabbed my hair with one hand and smacked me across the face with his other hand.
“Push with your legs or you’re gonna die,” he shouted.
He smacked me across the face! I couldn’t believe it. You see it on the tab but to have someone do it to you was just shocking.
So it worked, that smack. I came up from the sleepiness. I was up from down under. I was awake.
I pushed out from under the seat and stumbled up to my feet. Niko half dragged me through the hail, down the “aisle” that was not an aisle but was actually the space above the seats (because, remember, the bus was on its side).
The hail was still crashing and pounding through the windows. It seemed to have a gait now. Small hail, small hail, then a couple whoppers. Little, little, brutal.
I saw Niko take a big one to the shoulder, but he didn’t even react.
Mrs. Wooly had the front door of her bus pulled right up to the back of ours. Niko pushed me through the emergency door. Mrs. Wooly hauled me up and pushed me up the steps of her bus.
Jake Simonsen then grabbed my arm and pulled me down the aisle and put me into a seat. Then I got dizzy and my vision got all sparky, and before I knew it, I threw up on Jake Simonsen. Football star. King of the beautiful. And the vomit was, I am not kidding you, black like tar. Oatmeal and tar.
“Sorry,” I said, wiping my mouth.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Sit down.”
Mrs. Wooly’s bus was in much better shape than ours. There were giant dents in the ceiling. Her windshield looked nearly opaque, it was so crosshatched with cracks, and most of the back windows were broken from the hail flying in; but it was Air Force One compared to our bus.
Josie was slumped next to a window. Astrid was trying to stop the flow of blood from Josie’s head. Brayden had his tablet out of his backpack and was trying to power up.
Niko started coughing up gunk up in the first seat.
And that was us.
There had been at least fifteen kids on the bus. Now it was Jake, Brayden, Niko, Astrid, Josie, and me.
Mrs. Wooly put the bus in gear and it lurched toward the Greenway.
The hail was changing now. Changing into a heavy, frozen rain. The quiet of the rain was so strong I felt it in my bones. A steady, heavy whoosh.
They say that your ears ring after you listen to something loud, like a rock concert. This was a continuous GONGONGONGONGONG. The quiet hurt as much as the hail.
I started coughing hard. Sort of a cross between coughing and vomiting. Black gunk, gray gunk, brown gunk. My nose was running. My eyes were pouring tears. I could tell my body was trying to get the smoke out of me.
Suddenly everything got orange and bright. The windows and the thin window frames stood out, illuminated against a silhouette of fire and … BOOM, our old bus exploded.
Within seconds the entire behemoth was engulfed in flames.
“Well,” Jake said. “That was close.”
I laughed. That was funny, to me.
Niko just looked at me like I was crazy.
Brayden stood up and pointed out the window at the flaming wreckage that had once been our bus.
“Class A friggin’ lawsuit, my friends,” he said. “Right there.”
“Sit down, Brayden,” Jake said.
Brayden ignored him, and stood, counting us.
“The six of us,” he continued. “We’re suing the Board of Education! Where my dad works, they have plans for this kind of stuff. Emergency plans. There should have been a plan. A drill!”
I looked away from him. Clearly, Brayden was a little crazy at this moment in time but I couldn’t blame him. He had every right to be unhinged.
The bus reached the store. I thought she’d stop it outside and we’d walk in, but no, just as she had before, Mrs. Wooly drove it right through the hole where the glass doors had been and then we were inside the Greenway, in a bus.
Surreal upon surreal upon surreal.
There were no Greenway employees around so I figured they must not have come to work yet.
The elementary and middle school kids were grouped together in the little Pizza Shack restaurant-within-the-store area.
I saw Alex through the bus window and he stepped forward, squinting to try to see me. The bus sputtered to a stop on the shiny linoleum. Mrs. Wooly got off, then Niko, then me. I stumbled over to Alex, my legs still weren’t working completely right, and then I hugged him hard. I got char and vomit all over him but I didn’t care.
He had actually been pretty clean before I hugged him. They all were. The little kids were scared, of course, but Mrs. Wooly had gotten them out of harm’s way in a hurry.
One thing that bears explaining is that the middle school and grammar school in Monument were right next to each other, so for some of the little pocket neighborhoods, like ours, they had one bus collect the kids for the two schools. That’s why there were eighth graders and kindergarteners mixed together on Mrs. Wooly’s bus.
From the five-year-olds to the eighth graders, the kids from her bus looked fine.
Not us. We looked like we’d been in a war.
Mrs. Wooly started barking out instructions.
She sent an eighth grader named Sahalia and a couple little kids to the Pharmacy section of the store to get bandages, first aid cream, that kind of thing. She sent two kindergarteners to get a cart full of water, Gatorade, and cookies.
Niko said he’d go get some thermal blankets to help prevent shock. He was looking at Josie when he said it and I
could see why.
Josie was definitely looking worse for the wear. She was sitting slumped on the steps of the bus, keening and rocking back and forth. The bleeding on her forehead had slowed, but the blood was thick and clumpy in her hair and dried on her face in patches. She looked totally terrifying.
The remaining little kids were just standing and staring at Josie, so Mrs. Wooly sent them off to help Sahalia. Then she looked at Astrid.
“Help me get her into the Pizza Shack,” she said.
Together they lifted Josie to her feet and led her to a booth.
Alex and I sat together at one booth. Brayden and Jake and the rest just kind of slumped at their own tables.
We all started talking. It was all along the lines of I can’t believe what just happened. I can’t believe what just happened. I can’t believe what just happened.
My brother kept asking me, “Dean, are you sure you’re okay?” I kept saying I was fine.
But my ears were funny. I heard this rhythmic clattering sound and the boom-boom-boom of the hail was still in my bones.
Sahalia and the little kids came back with a cart loaded with medicines and first aid stuff.
Mrs. Wooly came and looked at us one by one and gave us whatever she thought might help.
Josie took the most of her attention. Mrs. Wooly tut-tutted over the gaping cut on Josie’s forehead.
The chocolate hue of Josie’s skin made the gash look worse. The red of the blood was brighter, somehow.
“It’s gonna need stitches, hun,” she told Josie.
Josie just sat there staring ahead, rocking back and forth.
Mrs. Wooly poured hydrogen peroxide over the cut. It bubbled up pink and frothed down over Josie’s temple, down her neck.
Mrs. Wooly blotted the cut with gauze and then coated it with ointment. She put a big square of gauze over it and then wrapped Josie’s head with gauze. Maybe Mrs. Wooly had been a nurse in her youth. I don’t know but it was a professional-looking job.
Niko returned with some of those silver space blankets hikers use. He wrapped one around Josie and offered me one.
“I’m not in shock,” I told him.
He just looked at me calmly, his hand outstretched with the blanket.
I did seem to be shaking somewhat. Then it occurred to me that the strange sound I was hearing might be the chattering of my own teeth.
I took the blanket.
Mrs. Wooly came over to me. She had some baby wipes and she wiped off my face and neck and then felt all over my head.
Can you imagine letting your grammar school bus driver wipe your face with a baby wipe and look through your hair? It was absurd. But everything had changed and nobody was teasing anybody.
People had died—we had almost died.
Nobody was teasing anybody.
Mrs. Wooly gave me three Advil and some cough syrup. She also gave me a gallon bottle of water and told me to start drinking and not stop until I hit the bottom.
“How are your legs?” she asked. “Seemed like you were walking funny before.”
I stood up. My ankle was sore, but I was basically fine.
“I’m okay.”
“I’ll get us some clothes,” Niko volunteered. “We can change and get cleaned up.”
“You sit down,” Mrs. Wooly ordered him.
He sank slowly into one of the booths, coughing black gunk onto his sleeve.
She looked Niko over and wiped down his face and neck, just like she’d done for the rest of us.
“I’m gonna tell the school about what you did back there,” Mrs. Wooly said to him quietly. “Real heroic, son.”
Niko turned red. He started to get up.
Mrs. Wooly pressed a bottle of Gatorade into his hands with some Advil and another bottle of cough syrup.
“You’re sitting,” she told him.
He nodded his head, coughing up more gunk.
Jake was pressing the screen of his minitab repeatedly.
“Hey, Mrs. Wooly, I’m not getting a signal,” Jake told her. “It’s like it’s out of juice, but I know it’s charged.”
One by one, pretty much everybody took out a minitab and tried to turn it on.
“Network’s probably down,” Mrs. Wooly said. “But keep trying. It’ll come back.”
Alex took out his minitab. It was dead—blank. He started to cry. It seems funny now. He didn’t cry during the storm, he didn’t cry seeing me all beat up, he didn’t cry about the kids who’d been killed on my bus—he started crying when we realized the Network was down.
The Network had never, ever gone down.
We had all seen hundreds of commercials aimed at reassuring people that the National Connectivity was infallible. We had to believe that because all of our files—photos, movies, e-mails, everything—were all kept in big servers “up in the sky.”
Without the Network, you had no computer. You just had a blank tablet. Maybe fifteen dollars worth of plastic and scrap metal. You had nothing.
And there were supposed to be a thousand backups in place to make the Network impervious to natural disasters—to nuclear war—to anything.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Brayden started railing. “If the Network’s down, who’s going to come and get us? They won’t even know where we are!”
Jake started talking in his deep, chill-out voice, telling Brayden to calm down. That everything would be okay.
But Alex slid out of the booth and started kind of screaming, “The Network can’t be down! It can’t be. You don’t know what this means!”
Alex was locally famous for being good with computers and machines. People we hardly knew dropped by with malfunctioning tablets to see if he could debug them. On the first day of high school, my English teacher pulled me aside to ask if I was Alex Grieder’s brother and did I think he would look at her car’s GPS.
So if anyone among us was going to get the implications of the Network being down, it was Alex.
Mrs. Wooly grabbed Alex by the shoulders.
“Grieder Jr.,” she said. “Go get some clothes for Grieder Sr.”
By Grieder Sr. she meant me, of course.
“But you don’t understand,” Alex wailed.
“Go get clothes for your brother. And for these other guys. Take a cart. Go right now,” she directed. “Sahalia, you go with him and get stuff for the girls.”
“I don’t know their sizes,” Sahalia protested.
“I’ll go with you,” Astrid said.
Mrs. Wooly opened her mouth to tell Astrid to sit down and then closed it again. Mrs. Wooly knew her kids, you see. She knew that Astrid wouldn’t be told what to do.
So Astrid and Alex and Sahalia went.
I drank my water.
I worked real hard on not throwing up any more.
A couple of the little kids pawed at their minitabs. They kept pressing the screens on their dead minitabs and cocking their little heads to the side. Waiting, waiting.
They couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on.
* * *
It was weird, changing with Brayden and Jake in the bathroom. These were not guys I was friends with. Jake was a senior. Brayden was a junior, like me. But they were both on the football team and were built. I was neither.
Jake had always ignored me in a genial kind of way but Brayden had been downright mean to me.
For a moment I considered going into a stall to change. Brayden saw me hesitate.
“Don’t worry, Geraldine,” he said. “We won’t look if you’re shy.”
Dean … Geraldine … Get it?
He’d started the Geraldine thing back in grammar school.
Then, when we were in eighth grade, he’d had this bit about my hair. That it needed “styling.” He’d spit in his hands and work it into my hair, like the spit was gel. By the end of the year, he would just spit right on my head and mash it around with his hand.
Real stylish.
I understood Brayden was considered handsome by the
girls. He had that olive color of skin that always seems tan, and brown, wavy hair and very thick eyebrows. Kind of Cro-Magnon-man eyebrows to me, but I gathered that the girls thought he looked rugged and dangerous. I gathered this because every time he was around they’d twitter and preen in a way that sort of made me hate everyone.
What I’m saying is—me and Brayden—we were not friends.
I didn’t go into a stall, I just shucked off my dirty shirt and jeans and started washing up at the sink.
“Can you believe that hail?!” Jake said.
“It was unbelievable,” Brayden answered.
“Totally unbelievable,” I agreed.
“I know!”
Jake asked me about a particularly foul welt on my arm from a hailstone.
“It really hurts,” I said.
“You’re okay, Dean,” Jake said, and he clapped me on the shoulder. Which also hurt.
Maybe he just got swept up in the good feeling. Or maybe he was trying to take care of me and be a leader. I didn’t care if it was a put-on. It was good to feel normal for a moment.
“Hey, Jake,” I said. “Sorry about the puke.”
“Man, don’t think another thing about it,” he said.
I tossed him the sweatshirt Alex had gotten for me from the racks out in the Greenway.
“Here,” I said. “I picked it out just for you. It’ll go nice with your eyes.”
Jake laughed with a start. I had surprised him.
Brayden laughed, too.
Then our laughter chuckled along until it got completely out of hand, until we were all gulping air, tears in eyes.
It hurt my throat, which was still raw from the smoke, but Jake and Brayden and me, we laughed for a long time.
* * *
After we had changed, Mrs. Wooly held a kind of a makeshift assembly.
“It’s maybe eight or nine,” she told us. “The Network is still down and I’m a little worried about our friend Josie here. I think she’s in shock, so she’ll probably come around in a day or two. But it might be something more serious.”
We all looked at Josie, who stared back at us with a weird, detached interest, as if we were people whose faces and names she couldn’t quite place.